Bau Thuy's VFF presidential bid: the balance sheet of a federation that pays its own wages

At Rajamangala in Bangkok on 5 January 2026, the referee blew the final whistle deep into stoppage time. Vietnam beat Thailand 3-2, 5-3 on aggregate over two legs, and one corner of the stadium in red shirts simply came apart. In a packed press room, the Thai reporters asked coach Kim Sang-sik how he had solved Thailand's high press. The Vietnamese reporters, in turn, asked about the bonus. I was sitting in the third row and wrote two words in my notebook: who pays.

Ten days later, in Hanoi, I had a list of the companies that had pledged money to the national team. A national federation had just won Southeast Asia's biggest trophy, yet the players' bonus pool was assembled from a bank, a retail group, a couple of construction firms and a charitable fund. The federation contributed a share; most of it came from outside. That has never been a secret, and it describes almost the entire power structure of Vietnamese football: the person signing those cheques is neither a coach nor a player.

It is the president of the Vietnam Football Federation, a title decided by more than sixty member organisations in a hall where votes tend to follow sponsorship lines. Which is why, ten months after that title, when I heard from two sides that Nguyen Duc Thuy — known across Vietnamese football as Bau Thuy, chairman of the board of Saigon-Hanoi Commercial Joint Stock Bank (SHB) — is preparing a run for the VFF presidency in the 2026-2030 term, I did not treat it as political news. I treated it as an unpublished financial statement.

A name returns to the board

The ninth VFF congress was held in Hanoi in November 2026, opening the 2026-2026 term. Tran Quoc Tuan was re-elected president. Among the names floated behind the scenes at the time was Nguyen Duc Thuy; it never appeared on the ballot. Four years later, the cycle repeats: a new congress, a new four-year term, and an old question.

Let me be explicit here, in the way France Bleu taught me: unverified, unbroadcast. What I have are two independent sources — one working inside the provincial federation system, one in the corporate sponsorship market — pointing in the same direction. There is no document, no press release, and the VFF has not commented. So this article does not conclude that Thuy will run. It analyses what happens to Vietnamese football if a man like him enters the race, and what that says about the financial architecture of the game here.

His record needs no embellishment. He chairs a commercial bank with a wide branch network and a long-standing foreign strategic shareholder, and he has a history with Vietnamese football through sponsorship contracts and through the years when SHB stood behind a professional club in central Vietnam. In Vietnam, people call businessmen like him by a single short word: bau. The word appears in no FIFA statute, but it appears in every Vietnamese football election.

The next term arrives with three specific pressures. First, the national team reached the summit of Southeast Asia but had already missed the third round of 2026 World Cup qualifying in June 2026, after two defeats to Indonesia, including a 0-3 loss at My Dinh on 26 March 2026. Second, the cost of running professional football has risen faster than club revenue, especially after COVID-19. Third, the youth system and the women's game need a stable funding line that the federation's own budget cannot generate. All three pressures point at one question: who can raise capital.

The balance sheet of a federation

I bring a spreadsheet into the studio whenever I talk about the VFF, not because I love cells, but because a spreadsheet forces answers that speech lets you avoid. A national federation in Southeast Asia has four main revenue lines: commercial sponsorship tied to the national team and youth sides; media rights for the professional leagues, largely operated by the Vietnam Professional Football Joint Stock Company (VPF); FIFA and AFC support distributed across a four-year cycle; and matchday, ticketing and event hospitality income.

Of those four, the first is the most fragile. It depends on three to five large companies, and every time the national team loses a significant match, the federation's negotiating position weakens immediately. The second does not sit fully in the VFF's hands, because VPF is a separate legal entity owned partly by the clubs. The third is stable but capped, and every FIFA member association receives it, so it creates no competitive advantage. The fourth depends on the one thing Vietnamese football does both very well and very badly at the same time: the fervour of its crowds.

On the cost side, the three largest items are the salary and costs of the national team's coaching staff; the youth, women's and futsal programmes; and the administrative machine. When Philippe Troussier's contract ended in March 2026 and Kim Sang-sik was appointed in May 2026, each signature rewrote the balance sheet. The salary of a foreign national-team coach is routinely larger than the entire youth development budget of a provincial federation for several years.

You do not read a deal by listening to rumours; you read it by watching where the money goes. At the VFF, money travels in a zigzag: from sponsor to federation, from federation to national team, from national team back into brand value for the sponsor. Whoever sits in the president's chair must keep that circuit unbroken. And the best person at keeping it unbroken, for years, has not been a sports administrator. It has been someone who can call a bank chairman and get an answer.

When the bank runs the football

A contract is the minutes of greed, but it is also the diary of hope. I have read enough sponsorship agreements to know that behind every "diamond sponsor" line there is arithmetic: how many square metres of hoarding, how many minutes on television, how many VIP seats, and how much goodwill with the provincial government where the factory sits.

A VFF president with a banking background brings two things nobody else can. The first is direct funding capacity: a financial institution can put money into youth football, the women's game and coaching programmes without waiting for a state disbursement. The second is the ability to restructure the whole system's debt: many Vietnamese professional clubs live on short-term credit, pay player wages out of overdraft facilities, and pledge broadcast income. Someone who understands credit sees that picture more clearly than any sports official.

At exactly that point, however, advantage becomes collateral. If the federation president is also the lender to member clubs, then every disciplinary decision, every club licensing decision, every broadcast negotiation has a party who is not at the table but is nonetheless on the table. FIFA and AFC statutes do not forbid businessmen from leading federations. They require conflict-of-interest disclosure and recusal from directly related decisions. On paper, that mechanism is sufficient. In practice, in a football economy where most clubs are short of cash, a president who can lend is a president who cannot be questioned.

One detail is rarely mentioned. The AFC club licensing system, implemented in Vietnam through VPF, requires clubs to prove they have no overdue payables to players, to other clubs and to tax authorities. Every season, a handful of clubs fall into the group that needs an extension or an exception. The body that ultimately governs those exceptions is the federation. If that body's leader is also the clubs' creditor, licensing turns into a commercial negotiation dressed as administrative procedure. I am not saying this has happened. I am saying the structure permits it, and the structure is what must be fixed before we discuss personnel.

Where the votes live

A VFF presidential election is not a parliamentary election. The voters are delegates of more than sixty member organisations: provincial and municipal federations, professional clubs, and a number of affiliated associations and units. Each holds votes under the statutes, and congress typically draws a few hundred delegates.

Having sat through several industry congresses, I have learned the arithmetic of such halls: the decisive bloc is not in the big cities. It is in the provincial federations, where the annual budget covers pitch rental, electricity and a few bus trips to competitions. For those units, a three-year sponsorship promise for youth football is worth more than a ten-year development strategy. That is why VFF campaigns always begin with trips to the provinces, not with a press conference in Hanoi.

At the other end, the professional clubs are the group with the most concrete interests and the least patience. They want fewer matches, a less congested calendar, more broadcast money, better refereeing and VAR. They care little about school football. A candidate must weld these two blocs together, and the traditional weld in Vietnam is money: support for the provinces, plus a promise of higher revenue for the clubs by dragging more sponsors into the league system.

This structure explains why a businessman with a bank behind him always starts with an advantage, and why Vietnamese football struggles to escape the bau model. People vote for whoever can pay, because over the next four years there will be a great many bills.

The lesson from a desk in Paris

In France, where I work, professional football does not leave money to the goodwill of owners. Since the 1980s, French football has had the DNCG, a national management control body that reviews each club's budget before every season. A club that wants to compete must prove solvency, not merely prove it has a stadium. The DNCG can impose transfer bans, cap wages, and administratively relegate clubs. Nobody likes it. It is also the reason French football did not collapse en masse when an owner lost his fortune.

French football has also sold part of its future for cash: in 2026, Ligue 1 transferred 13 per cent of a new commercial subsidiary to the CVC fund for around 1.5 billion euros. It was a controversial decision, taken by a board with accountability, audit and public reporting.

The comparison is not an argument that Vietnam should copy France. It points at a gap: Vietnamese football has no sufficiently independent mechanism that can say no to the person who pays. Without such a mechanism, every election becomes an auction, and the winner is whoever has the prettiest balance sheet rather than the best plan.

The blind spot: faith in the payer

The story Vietnamese media have told for years is easy on the ear: football needs money, businessmen have money, therefore businessmen should run things. The upgraded version is: if a bank stands behind the president, football will have stable resources and will depend less on the state budget.

I understand the appeal, and I do not dismiss it entirely. The problem lies elsewhere: a federation that takes money from its own president stops being football's creditor and becomes its debtor. A debtor cannot make decisions that hurt the creditor. When the VFF needs to discipline a club with a credit relationship to that bank, when it needs to negotiate media rights with a partner in which that bank holds shares, when it needs to reject a fixture list that favours one group of clubs, the desk will remember who paid for it.

The insider is not the person who knows the most; the insider is the person who stays calmest when everything collapses. During COVID-19, I spent three hours on air with a players' union representative and a labour lawyer after taking twenty-three calls from stadium cleaners and ticket sellers in Paris. The lesson was simple: when money stops moving, the first to hurt are not the people who sign sponsorship deals but the people who sweep the stands and check the tickets. Vietnamese football employs thousands of them across the league system. A change of president must not make them afraid again.

In fairness, the reverse is also true: without private money, Vietnamese football would not have a fourteen-club V.League 1, private academies, or the contracts that send young players to Europe. Dependence on business is the reality of a league that cannot yet sell its rights at a high enough price. So the question is not whether businessmen should lead. The question is the framework in which they lead.

The next domino

If Nguyen Duc Thuy does enter the race, three dominoes will fall before the congress. First, the relationship between SHB and professional clubs will have to be explained publicly, in writing, not in a press-conference denial. Second, current VFF sponsors will recalculate their position, because a president with his own bank can pull an entire financial ecosystem into the league. Third, VPF and the VFF will have to state clearly who holds the broadcast rights for 2026-2030, because that is the largest single revenue line a federation can negotiate.

At 46, I no longer chase breaking news; I chase verified fact. The only verified fact right now is that a Southeast Asian title won in January 2026 does not pay the bills of the next four years. If Vietnamese football wants a 2026-2030 term that does not depend on one man's wallet, the work before the congress is not to find the richest candidate. It is to write the mechanism that stops the richest candidate from deciding everything. A ballot can change a president in one morning. A mechanism takes four years, and rather more courage.